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Tag Archives: SQL server performance

SQL Server VM Performance with VMware vSphere 6.5

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Achieving optimal SQL Server performance on vSphere has been a constant focus here at VMware; I’ve published past performance studies with vSphere 5.5 and 6.0 which showed excellent performance up to the maximum VM size supported at the time.

Since then, there have been quite a few changes!  While this study uses a similar test methodology, it features an updated hypervisor (vSphere 6.5), database engine (SQL Server 2016), OLTP benchmark (DVD Store 3), and CPUs (Intel Xeon v4 processors with 24 cores per socket, codenamed Broadwell-EX).

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VMware vCloud Air Database Performance Scalability with SQL Server

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Previous posts have shown vSphere can easily handle running Microsoft SQL Server on four-socket servers with large numbers of cores—with vSphere 5.5 on Westmere-EX and more recently with vSphere 6 on Ivy Bridge-EX.  We recently ran similar tests on vCloud Air to measure how these enterprise databases with mission critical performance requirements perform in a cloud environment. The tests show that SQL Server databases scale very well on vCloud Air with a variety of virtual machine (VM) counts and virtual CPU (vCPU) sizes.

The benchmark tests were run with vCloud Air using their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) subscription-based service.  This is a very compelling hybrid cloud service that allows for an on-premises vSphere infrastructure to be expanded into the public cloud in a secure and scalable way. The underlying host hardware consisted of two 8-core CPUs for a total of 16 physical cores, which meant that the maximum number of vCPUs was 16 (although additional processors were available via Hyper-Threading, they were not utilized).

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SQL Server VM Performance on VMware vSphere 6

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Last October, I blogged about SQL Server performance with vSphere 5.5 using a four-socket Intel Xeon processor E7 based host.  Now that vSphere 6 is available, I’ve run an updated set of tests using this new release, on an even more powerful host, with Xeon E7 v2 processors.  A variety of virtual CPU (vCPU) and virtual machine (VM) quantities were tested to show that vSphere can handle hundreds of thousands of online transaction processing (OLTP) database operations per minute.

DVD Store 2.1, an open-source OLTP database stress tool, was the workload used to stress the VMs.  The first experiment in the paper was a generational performance comparison between the old and new setups; as you can see, there is a dramatic increase in throughput, even though the size of each VM has doubled from 8 vCPUs per VM to 16:

Generational performance improvement from old study to new study

There are also tests using CPU affinity to show the performance differences between physical cores and logical processors (Hyper-Threads), the benefit of “right-sizing” virtual machines, and measuring the impact of the advanced Latency Sensitivity setting. 

For more details and the test results, please download the whitepaper: Performance Characterization of Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere 6.

Monster Performance with SQL Server VMs on vSphere 5.5

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VMware vSphere provides an ideal platform for customers to virtualize their business-critical applications, including databases, ERP systems, email servers, and even newly emerging technologies such as Hadoop.  I’ve been focusing on the first one (databases), specifically Microsoft SQL Server, one of the most widely deployed database platforms in the world.  Many organizations have dozens or even hundreds of instances deployed in their environments. Consolidating these deployments onto modern multi-socket, multi-core, multi-threaded server hardware is an increasingly attractive proposition for IT administrators.

Achieving optimal SQL Server performance has been a continual focus for VMware; with current vSphere 5.x releases, VMware supports much larger “monster” virtual machines that can scale up to 64 virtual CPUs and 1 TB of RAM, including exposing virtual NUMA architecture to the guest. In fact, the main goal of this blog and accompanying whitepaper is to refresh a 2009 study that demonstrated SQL performance on vSphere 4, given the marked technology advancements on both the software and hardware fronts.

These tests show that large SQL Server 2012 databases run extremely efficiently with VMware, achieving great performance in a variety of virtual machine configurations with only minor tunings to SQL Server and the vSphere ESXi host. These tunings and other best practices for fully optimizing large virtual machines for SQL Server databases are presented in the paper.

One test in the paper shows the maximum host throughput achieved with different numbers of virtual CPUs per VM. This was measured starting with 8 vCPUs per VM, then doubled to 16, then 32, and finally 64 (the maximum supported with vSphere 5.5).  DVD Store, which is a popular database tool and a key workload of the VMmark benchmark, was used to stress the VMs.  Here is a graph from the paper showing the 8 vCPU x 8 VMs case, which achieved an aggregate of 493,804 opm (operations per minute) on the host:

8 x 8 vCPU VM throughput

There are also tests using CPU affinity to show the performance differences between physical cores and logical processors (Hyper-Threads), the impact of various virtual NUMA (vNUMA) topologies, and experiments with the Latency Sensitivity advanced setting.

For more details and the test results, please download the whitepaper: Performance and Scalability of Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere 5.5.

Virtualizing SQL Server-based vCenter database – Performance Study

vSphere is an industry-leading virtualization platform that enables customers to build private clouds for running enterprise applications such as SQL server databases. Customers can expect near-native performance from their virtualized SQL databases when running in a vSphere environment. VMware vCenter Server, the management component of vSphere, uses a database to store and organize information related to vSphere-based virtual environments. This database can be implemented using SQL server. Based on the previous VMware performance studies involving SQL databases, it is reasonable to expect the performance of a virtualized SQL Server-based vCenter database to be similar to that in native.

A study was conducted in the VMware performance engineering lab to validate the assumption. The results of the study show that:

  • The most resource-intensive operations of a virtualized SQL Server-based vCenter database perform at a level comparable to that in native environment.
  • A SQL Server-based vCenter database managing a vSphere virtual environment of any scale can be virtualized on vSphere.
  • SQL databases, in general, perform at a near-native level when virtualized on vSphere 4.1.

Complete details of the experiments and their results can be found in this technical document.

For comments or questions on this article, please join me at voiceforvirtual.com.